The selected performance categories for the 2009-10 festival edition were:
Reenactment performance = reenactment of past performances; reenactment in general; retrace an historic event or the life of someone; identification, historical and anthropological research
Theatre performance = stage actions in not conventional spaces; performance for many bodies and performance for only one body; actorial; mix of various media; non-narrative performances
Random performance = non planned actions; chaos applied to the performance; indefinite, linear and / or cyclic time; overcoming social limits or psychological pressure, public space performance, tasks performance
Gender performance = performance to overcome physical limits; identity research, sexual background, roles exchange; disguising
These four genres seemed to capture the interests dominating current performance art practice. Artists and curators had to choose one or more of the proposed categories to describe their festival action. It was very exciting to see how participants used the categories as a way of enacting a kind of “role play.” This trend accentuated the way categories can intersect – that is, by personifying the category chosen (as well as the contradictions therein), the artists were able to point up the fact of there being an almost unlimited number of ways to create intercategory relationships, and assert the absurdity of delimiting a work by restricting it to one categorical label. This is why it became necessary, and we felt it appropriate, to create a new classification: “in between” categories.